Is WikiLeaks Judge Having Second Thoughts?

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Is WikiLeaks Judge Having Second Thoughts?

The WikiLeaks judge might be softening.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White issued a document late Thursday suggesting he might have erred last week when he signed an order that took down the WikiLeaks site and also locked "the WikiLeaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar."

A hearing on the issue is scheduled for Friday morning in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

WikiLeaks, a whistleblower site that recently published documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, was taken offline after posting allegedly stolen documents suggesting a Cayman Islands branch of a Swiss bank was helping customers practice money laundering and tax evasion.

As fellow THREAT LEVELscribe Kim Zetter has been reporting, Dynadot – WikiLeaks' U.S. hosting company and domain registrar based in San Mateo, California – agreed to take down and lock the site at the behest of Julius Baer Bank and Trust. Judge White signed the accord without hearing from WikiLeaks – an accord that broaches a myriad of First Amendment issues.

In a three-page order issued hours ahead of Friday's hearing, White, appointed by the second President Bush, wondered whether last week's order went too far. "Without WikiLeaks making an appearance, was there any more narrowly tailored remedy for protecting private information from stolen documents from the web site beside locking and disabling the web site until such time as the disputed documents were removed or redacted?"

White also asked whether the accord trumps the First Amendment. He demanded responses concerning a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, in which the high court generally found that it was wrong to be "punishing disclosures of lawfully obtained information of public interest by one not involved in the initial illegality."

White wondered whether the bank's remedy is against Rudolf Elmer, the bank's former vice president of its Cayman Islands' operation. The bank claims Elmer stole and leaked the bank's private documents that purport to show the institution assists its clients in hiding assets from the tax man.

Among the other questions Judge White wants to discuss, they include: "What authority stands for the proposition that the right to privacy trumps the freedom of access to information in this or a similar context?"